UFC 152's Jones-Belfort headliner taught us title fights should happen for a reason

For about 10 seconds on Saturday night, the light-heavyweight title bout at UFC 152 seemed competitive.

As Vitor Belfort locked up an armbar off his back and clung to it like a drowning man to a piece of driftwood, you could almost convince yourself that he belonged in a fight with UFC 205-pound champion Jon Jones. Maybe. If you squinted so the size difference wasn’t so apparent. And if you didn’t stick around to watch the next 15 or so minutes of the fight, which were all Jones, all the way.

Those 10 seconds, though, those were exciting.

Jones’ arm bent a way it wasn’t supposed to bend, his face grimaced a way we haven’t seen it grimace. For the briefest of moments in Toronto’s Air Canada Centre, it seemed that Belfort might pull off what would have been the biggest MMA upset in years. Then Jones pulled out his arm and went about the work of opening the Brazilian challenger’s face with a series of slicing elbows, thus bringing an end to the interesting but unplanned interruption. We now return you to your regularly scheduled beatdown, already in progress.

Even if it had ended then, in the first round, Belfort already would have over-performed. He was a middleweight who wasn’t even supposed to be there, let alone take such a convincing swipe at victory. But instead of folding after his early bid failed, he lasted until the fourth while choosing to spend much of the intervening time on his back, as if he hoped that the position itself were magical enough to save him.

It wasn’t. He lost, first slowly and then all at once. He got beat up and then submitted. He proved more than he needed to about his own willingness to take a beating, but he never managed to threaten Jones very much after that initial armbar scare.

And Jones? Jones proved that he can get his elbow popped and still stay calm enough to do his usual fighting Mozart routine. He was in no hurry. He took his time and did his job with patient precision, and in the end the fans got just enough pain and suffering out of the deal to feel as though the matchup wasn’t completely absurd. That’s about all they got though, which was probably more than they had a right to expect.

For Jones, who came into this bout as a 9-1 favorite (after opening as high as 13-to-1), exceeding expectations was nearly impossible. If he’d knocked out Belfort with a stern glare from across the cage, that might have done it. Anything else was only confirmation of what we already suspected. If anything, maybe getting himself briefly armbarred before resuming the inevitable march toward victory was the best thing he could have done. Jones is the rare fighter who’s been so dominant thus far in his career that it actually helps him to prove that he can still win even when he doesn’t start out that way. We’ve known for a few years that he’s brilliant. When he takes a good punch or fights through a tight armbar, he also proves he’s tough.

Belfort proved the same thing, in his own way. His toughness was a stubborn thing, even if it wasn’t a particularly helpful one. At 35 years old, he volunteered for a short-notice fight against a bigger, better, younger champion in a weight class in which he hadn’t competed in five years. If you wanted to know how long it had been since his heavyweight and light-heavyweight glory days in the UFC, all you had to do was take a look at how old most of UFC 152’s pre-fight hype footage was. When they can’t even find many clips of you cracking skulls in HD, it’s not a great sign.

There were very few good reasons for Belfort to get this shot in this division except that the UFC needed a warm, promotable body for a title fight that had a date before it had a challenger. Belfort, ever game for a go at glory, stepped up and took his best shot. When that didn’t work, he took his beating. Both are part of the job description, and he performed them with equal enthusiasm. This is what we knew would happen, even if we didn’t know it would look quite like this. The fact that it took four rounds and resulted in one possibly injured arm for the champion makes it seem more competitive, but this wasn’t a fight that made any sort of sense in the first place, so the result can only mean so much.

Did Jones show that he doesn’t mind messing up his own arm if that’s what it takes to beat up a bloated middleweight? Sure. Did Belfort show that he’s willing to bleed for his money, even well after his best hope at victory had slipped from his grasp and resumed elbowing him in the face? Absolutely. What are we supposed to do with that information? I’m not sure.

What will probably happen now is that Belfort will return to middleweight, where he belongs, and Jones will go back to defending his title against people his own size – assuming that his arm isn’t seriously injured. Because wouldn’t that be just the right punishment for the UFC, which seems to have taken Jones and his talents for granted? The last thing it needs is to lose another champion to injury. To lose a great one because of a fight that literally no one was asking for would be some real “Twilight Zone”-type justice.

The takeaway lesson for the UFC in all this? Seeing as how they can be risky even for the unambiguous and unsurprising winner, maybe title fights are things that should happen for a reason. Maybe champions should defend their belts against those who have earned it – even when doing so requires a little extra patience. Maybe the schedule should match the talent – rather than the talent being stretched and kneaded and manipulated into matching the schedule.

Because while you can get away with this once or twice, and while you can point to the few moments where this fight looked close and use it as retroactive proof that it wasn’t an arrangement of convenience, you’d better do it sparingly. The guys getting their elbows popped in triumph and faces slashed in bitter defiance would probably like to know that it actually means something. Both brands of toughness come at a price.

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